If you find yourself buying groceries in Mac’s at 7 a.m. on a Tuesday, it might be time to re-evaluate your nutritional paradigm. Wouldn’t be a bad idea to look at your time management skills while you’re at it.

With 7-11 and Mac’s getting the majority of the cigs and chips traffic, the once-ubiquitous and charming corner food store is an endangered species. There was once a time when the corner store was a true Food and General, complete with produce, a hardware section, and sewing supplies. There simply aren’t many places left where one can buy an Oh Henry!, a copy of Soldier of Fortune, a couple onions, a can of paint thinner, and a leather punch. 

Mega retail-opolises and gargantuan grocery outlets may have taken over, but there are a few holdouts. I recently explored a couple of classic E-town food stores and found them alive and kicking, fascinating in their diversity and their dust-ridden, long-ago-written-off inventory.

Empire Foods (51 Ave & 106 St) is a southside classic. It’s got that stale circa-1979 food-store smell. On a stand in front of the ATM machine, squatting like an alternate-universe Wal-Mart greeter, sits a giant lacquer Buddha. I give it a respectful nod and start wandering through the aisles. 

The cheesy oriental animal posters that adorn the walls catch me eyeing a rotating leather punch for $10. Sold. A three-pack of ratcheting tie-downs. Coldsore medication. Cutlery organizers. Sidewalk chalk. Sandwich bags filled (by the proprietors, presumably) with plastic cutlery—a steal at 25¢. The orange sign on the Lipton soup says $1.49. Forlorn and plaintive, a single #53 automotive bulb hangs off a hook like a question mark. 

Like any neighbourhood store worth its salt, there is the requisite wall of pornography. Obscure, shrink-wrapped titles such as Young Boys Today and Horny Housewives round the bases of sexual tastes. In close proximity to the skin rags is a selection of real bamboo sticks and bonsai trees. This is likely the only place in Edmonton (and possibly in the Western Hemisphere) where people can grab a copy of Swank, then rotate 180 degrees, reach out, and pick up a real-life bonsai tree. I bolt and hatch a thought for a new magazine: Barely Legal Conifers.

The Arden Vari-Mart (95 St & 114 Ave) is killer with its old-school awning and ’50s-era sign. One half of the store is your more or less standard-issue food store with a great selection of foodstuffs, varied enough that you could actually do some real grocery shopping here. 

But the other half of the store contains some truly baffling and bizarre finds. Sadly, there is not a page of porn to be found here. Instead, the magazine rack is jammed with hundreds of boxes of no-name saltines—also strewn throughout the store in strategic displays (right beside the tomato soup). A well-stocked (and likely unexploited) rack of wilted greeting cards is near the back. Tucked in a dank, poorly-lit corner is a dust-covered display of embroidery thread complete with peeling blue and white “grocery” price tags. 

A single bag of Safeway-brand diapers hangs sideways on a hook. A half-dozen plastic perogy makers are tucked between two different brands of rope. Beside the ancient selection of rental movies and behind a glass showcase filled with reams of lined PVC gloves, I come across the mack daddy of food-store finds: a pair of 48-inch dark wood Polynesian salad tongs. No price tag—my guess is that they’ve sat there since ’75. I buy my stuff, stroll past the dead Slurpee machine, and feel like I just walked out of David Lynch’s variety store.

There’s a sad charm to these places. With their utility largely replaced by big-box retail, they exist now mostly as the disheveled brothers and sisters of 7-11 and Mac’s. Lottery terminals and cigarettes pay the bills here, but small treasures can still be had. I’m breaking out the checkered pants and cheese fondue for the luau and making like it’s 1974. I tell ya, those salad tongs look pretty hot on my kitchen wall.